September Newsletter

Posted September 1, 2018

Our Latest News

Welcome to our Cullman Chemoprotection Center family. We hope to use this newsletter as a way to reach out to the growing network of people who are interested in our sort of research. Whereas most scientist-to-scientist communication is done via peer-reviewed, highly technical research papers, that just doesn’t cut it for communicating with our family, friends, neighbors and other non-scientists. Especially with the research that we do, where nutrition, diet, and lifestyle play a huge role in preventing various chronic diseases as well as causing them, it is important that we do a thorough job of communicating what we think are very interesting findings, to as many potential customers as possible.

Yes, we used the word “customer”, because with their food purchasing wallets everyone in the world can to some extent effect their risk for chronic diseases, or to put it in more positive terms they can enhance their chances for a longer and more vibrant “healthspan” (a lifespan lived in good health).

This summer has seen us embark upon a long-overdue emphasis on our social network – you, the customer of chemoprotection, who are interested in enhancing your healthspan. We have been fortunate to have the students profiled below helping us on that journey. In particular, Sierra has been an intern at the Center. Her main focus is assisting us in putting a regular communication plan in place (website, Twitter, Facebook, newsletter). She and Wendy, with Anita’s supervision, have also been working on a novel approach to personal nutrition, in which we are trying to exploit the high quality optics in modern smartphones, present even in the most remote corners of the world, to bring simple laboratory tests for such basic things as protein content of indigenous foodstuffs, into the hands of those who could most benefit from this knowledge. Collin, who is in the lab for a summer rotation prior to starting his PhD coursework, is helping us search for added value in agricultural waste – with a directed search for specific anti-inflammatory compounds that could be extracted, sold, or formulated from these wastestreams.

Please look to these pages in the future, for updates on what we’re doing and how it could impact your life, or that of members of your community. And we’d love to hear from you if you have questions, comments, ideas, or concerns.

Exciting Research Roundup

We have spent much of our time at the Center working on cancer prevention, and more recently on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Promising new research on each of these topics has been in the news lately, and in each case we are reminded of the critical nature of periconceptional nutrition:

In the first paper (Li et al 2018), prenatal maternal dietary exposure to sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts was most effective in inhibiting mammary tumor development (the mouse model of breast cancer) compared to postnatal early life (pre-puberty) and adult broccoli sprout treatment in two separate mouse models. This is one of many studies implicating in-utero exposure to dietary ingredients as being of great potential importance to later physical and mental development as well as disease susceptibility.

The second paper (Lammert et al 2018), explores the absolutely critical role that the gut (e.g. intestinal) microbiota (the bacteria, viruses, and other creatures which inhabit your insides) play in our development. The authors find that preconception manipulation of the microbiota can transfer susceptibility to autism (in a mouse model) from one animal to another. They further show that this susceptibility is related to maternal immune response.

Therapeutic strategies stemming from both studies, could involve very simple dietary changes.

We are happy to provide pdf files of these papers to anyone who cannot access them and would like to examine them more closely.

Welcome to our Newest Additions!

Wendy Tsai

Wendy is a 3rd year undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. She has spent the last year working on a project designed to enable isolated communities to assess protein content of the foods available to them, using only a cell phone. We have pilot tested the concept at a local girl’s school (Garrison Forest School). With her help in the coming year, we hope to make the project accessible to local communities in developing nations.

Sierra Kane

Sierra is a 3rd year undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the Center this summer as our Social Media Intern. She has worked on the Center’s Twitter presence, website, and newsletter. She will continue her attention to our social media needs during the academic year. Sierra is happy to have been able to help us establish a social media presence, and to communicate our results to a broader public audience, and she is excited to continue bringing awareness to the Center’s research.

Collin Warrick

Collin is a new PhD student in the Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences with an interest in neuroscience. He recently graduated from Washington State University and has had several years of lab experience before joining us for a summer rotation. He’s excited to learn more about our lab’s research and techniques.

And Goodbye to a Great Student!

Anita Panjwani

Anita is a 4th-year doctoral candidate in at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who has just gone back to Chicago to be with her family and finish her dissertation. We already miss her! She is studying the association between maternal plasma metabolites and offspring autism (ASD) in the Boston Birth Cohort. She is evaluating the role particular metabolites are playing — as co-risk factors of obesity and diabetes – in the prediction of offspring ASD. Her research will offer insight into the underlying mechanisms linking the maternal metabolic challenges of obesity and/or diabetes to offspring ASD. Anita has been with our Center for over three years working on various projects, including the cell-phone protein assay, flavor masking for Moringa-based foods, and designing a clinical trial for children with ASD.